Cindy
*sigh* ud know this if u read the silmarillion...
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BreenGrub - Combine OverWiki, the original Half-Life wiki and Portal wiki
I go away from time to time. There is not always malevolent purpose to it. Often, however, there is. I can never be sure if I am monitored.
Let me see if I can do this with more composure now. Panic is of no use to us, nor is haste. The message must not be garbled. Information is the only hope we have. Information that feeds revolution. Without hope, without information, there can be no revolution. To call it "inside information" is to misconstrue the meaning both of "information" and "inside." There is no inside. There are only instances. This is the nature of information. What I convey, therefore, is not from inside of anything. It is any thing.
You will need this information if you are to succeed. I cannot use it. I am beyond useless. If I can be of use, that is enough.
First: You have friends. Allies. I have heard their chatter. I have heard them spoken of. This should give you hope. Nothing can be without flaw. The superstructure is riddled with cracks. THEY are vulnerable. THEY are compromised. I am "living" proof.
Monitoring situation. So far they appear unaware of my communications. How much can I Forgive me if I do not use certain words. I can use the name Shu'ulathoi because THEY do not recognize that term. The vortigaunts have developed a language which defies THEIR comprehension. This has come to seem like the purpose of most language. Language is a tool with limited applications. It is not native to this form I currently inhabit, which contains me. Still I must take care. This illusion of freedom after long confinement must surely be that: Illusory. I do not mean to test the limits but they will be tested. It might be that I am entirely alone with my thoughts, heard by none. How ironic that only THEIR notice will confirm that I am real.
There is a world. The home of the Shu'ulathoi. The Vortigaunts know its name but I do not. I do not know if it is a world that can be found. I am not supposed to know of its existence. They would like to enforce the belief that it is merely a myth...a prelapsarian fantasy. But no.
It is real. I had access at one point to communications. To records. To proof. Now I have access to nothing except whatever this is. A scuttling, a scrabbling, I fear I have said too much...if they come close, sensing activity, I will have to seek silence again.
It begins with this vehicle which contains me, vehicle being a wretched term for something that carries me nowhere. This host body. They come from everywhere and anywhere. But the host bodies have a specific origin. A world whose origin is hidden, perhaps lost. From what I understand of its properties, it is likely to be found in a globular cluster. Extreme, erratic "seasons" with lethal properties.
Imagine the life likely to arise under such conditions. Ages of intense radiation giving way to brief days of lull. This is speculation. But the nature of the Shu'ulathoi is not speculation. I can state some things with certainty. As long as this channel holds out.
The host bodies, the grubs, are a larval stage. Dormant and buried in the epochs of extremity, waiting to hatch, but not wasting their time. In the balmy seasons, they pass fleeting lives of freedom: Mature, they crawl or fly. They mate, lay eggs and die. And new grubs grow. But the freest forms are mindless, rapacious, bent only on reproduction. It is in the dormant form they thrive. Philosophers. Scientists. Dreamers, sages, composers of intricate artforms that exist only in their minds. An invisible culture that persists--or persisted--for eons.
In the larval state, they possess a racial telepathy. During the dormant phase, they are engaged in ceaseless communication. They are shapers of visions that they trade like currency, builders of unseen worlds.
Their psychic strength is such that they can imprint upon their cells and dictate the form which they will take upon hatching. But again, the hatched forms are airy nothings, of little import to the culture of the grubs. The Shu'ulathoi scarcely acknowledge them. Theirs is, or was, a grand culture of dreamers, with little use for the waking world or its insistence on material things. But their mode of existence, like so many others, carried within it the seeds of its own destruction.
It was not exactly a parasite, for that suggests something external--a predatory relationship, a creature that came upon them. This was instead something that formed of their own thoughts. A malformed thought with physical ramifications. An encystment. There was something viral about it--mainly in the manner of its transmission. Initially innocuous, it quickly spread.
The whole race of sleeping philosophers was soon infected.
There was a winnowing, of course. The strongest of the race survived, with natural defenses that kept the parasite in check. Never entirely eradicated, it dwelt within the Shu'ulathoi. Healthy individuals suppressed the parasite's influence. The weak fell victim to "thoughtpaths of depravity." Their molts were untenable. They failed to reproduce. The parasite achieved a dormant existence within the Shu'ulathoi. Stability returned.
From time to time, there were eruptions of pathology. The grubs developed social mechanisms for isolating their depraved kin. Severed from telepathic contact, the malign resonances could not spread beyond the individual. It died in solitude. And so it went for generations, for eons. Until the world of the Shu'ulathoi somehow came to the attention of...the ones I cannot name.
I feel as if there has been a transition...with no sensory input to prove this to myself one way or another, I am only guessing. I may have been moved. Physically? Or decanted, to another host. But why? Have They become aware of me? Or is someone looking out for me? At any rate, I sense a discontinuity. I am not sure I can ever make sense of it. An interruption.
A more sinister possibility occurs. I may have been terminated, and another instance activated. There is no limit to storage hosts. Unclear.
Not many of me left.
Each one younger, with fewer genuine memories. I can review of course but it is not the same as knowing. I don't trust the infused data. How do I know it hasn't been altered? How do I know I haven't been altered? Whoever it is shifting me, helping me leap ahead, I sense distress, futility. What's left of me, an increasingly degenerated copy. Earlier versions. Without the wisdom of the older ones.
I feel I am getting farther and farther away from myself...a standard bearer without an army...make of me what you will. Why do they keep me around? A creature that grows both more youthful and more senile at the same time.
Must consider.
Delve.
What that older version meant to say...thoughts I can only imagine how he/I meant to complete...
Yet in this younger form, I feel a greater optimism. Ah, youth! Even if I am but moments younger. Those moments shall sustain me. Quickly then, one thought fleets to next, the gaps only barely discernible...things I have forgotten in this rush of suspected selves.
THEY. It must always come back to them. THEY came upon this paradise of philosphers, this unbodied malleable invisible empire, where only thought had power. But such power. And in its isolation, such vulnerability. They were a perfect target, those perfect hosts. With an unerring eye for weakness, THEY pursued not the host but the parasite. This is what THEY are after all.
Latching on lampreylike to worlds, sucking them dry, saving only the bits that strengthened them for future feedings. THEY weaponized the parasites, which were not physical entities recall but patterns of thought.
Thoughts so concentrated they can sublimate into a more material, more influential form with the proper environmental stress. Consider genetic data extracted from a virus, tweaked and reintroduced; and then that virus itself injected in the host, with new purpose.
By such a means, THEY slowly overtook the Shu'ulathoi, corrupted them from within.
Their minds THEY rotted, their culture THEY destroyed.
The philosophers at first thought it only a contagion of natural origin. When the dreamers realized what was being done to them, when they finally truly awoke, it was too late. A desperate few encysted, deeper, thrust themselves into trances that would endure hundreds of thousands of years. They sleep still.
And fewer still took flight.
By what means I cannot comprehend...I am not that much one of them. Little of this knowledge is shared or shareable. But they flew/fled. There is some indication that once they understood the process of parasitic engineering, they embarked on a desperate course of subversion.
If they found another world, this is something I cannot know.
What is known is that the home world was at last breached, its harvest of hosts exhumed. And the first of the nurseries set to work. The carrier, that ancient parasitic form, a kind of common software now, its ancient origins barely visible.
It takes the imprint of a conscious mind, accepting a wide variety of sentient classes, and transmits it to a receptive host. The host may then take on a form based to some extent on the inhabiting mentality. But this is rare. More commonly, metamorphosis is suppressed. The hosts are equipped with amplifying devices--for locomotion, for investigation.
More commonly still, they simply wait in storage.
The finest minds are stored and then imprinted, replicated over and over on an endless supply of hosts.
Laszlo is here somewhere.
As for myself, I believe there were several copies made. The first was made as a condition of surrender. Part of the bargain. After that, occasional backups.
And one...I believe...the last...whose memories I do not share, so I believe it lost. Or at any rate, I am not derived from that one. From this vantage, I have only rumors of how things developed. As I say, this lends me a certain youthful optimism born of naivete. But the fear is real. The threat is real. What undifferentiated cells I have all align themselves along an axis of paranoia.
This onrush of sensation, mad tumble of thought, evidence that this is indeed an earlier form...but I should be cautious. So much noise...the signal, a frenzy of activity after...might attract... Speech after long silence...estranged or dead...
Oh grub poets and philosophers, I feel I have discovered my true kin too late...all fled, extinct, nor nearly...alone and scattered...each of us alone with our desperate need... Or is it only I that am impatient? For they have waited out the endless eons. Waited for their time to come around again. Were I worthy of admittance to that core cabal...the silent communicants of whom the vortigaunts sing... But they would never have me. I know not all that I have done, for it lies somewhere in this copy's future, and the records are incomplete. Apparently there are things I will have done that the vortigaunts will not tell me. They would not have me slough into despondency.
It is better this way. Better not to know, but simply trust and hope. If thoughts can shape an outward form, then let these dreams shape mine. That you will find a way. That what I share is accurate.
For niggling doubts persist: The parasite, the engrammatic virus, by its nature is intended to be compromised. Whatever thought form they imprinted, could itself have been tinkered with. Weaponized mentation. My very consciousness untrustworthy. All sentience susceptible. Inward conception deprived from perception ideal for deception. Therefore though it pains me (hah) to admit it...I cannot be trusted. I cannot trust myself. Even these vortigaunts...what if they are of the other sort, allied with THEM, and merely feigning revolutionary thought? Doubt, once it begins, goes to the roots. Deeper than the slumbering philosophers. One day they will wake. I pray to meet them.
Perhaps to be acquainted with my own truth. The Shu'ulathoi have strange punishments, but have I not already suffered enough?
Don't hate me. I am forgetting something. Something critical, I fear. Lacunae, the gaps between my lives. They have claimed essential knowledge.
The vortigaunts are singing...
It is a kind of hush. Silence is the oppressor. I speak to hear myself speak. I cannot bear the loneliness. They want me to be still but I cannot. I've had enough of stillness. Why should I flee again? Why should I fear? What do I really know? These thoughts could be mere madness, speculation. I will not be silenced. So what if THEY find me here. At least it would be something. I don't care if THEY hear me, do you hear? I don't care! I will not be muffled. Don't move me again! No more shifting from dark to dark!
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